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Date and Time

Article Number: 1811 | Rating: Unrated | Last Updated: Thu, Jun 22, 2023 at 4:58 PM

Datafile Software

Date and Time

An exception to the rule that any item of data must be contained between element tags is the issue of date and time. These could be represented as data individual elements, of course, but often they are given in a combined form that might look like this:

2006-08-21T12:15:42.74

The hyphens separate the year from month from day; the "T” (if time is present) separates the time from the date; the colons separate hours from minutes from seconds, and it is possible to report decimal seconds.

On Input

If the database item is defined as a date type item (D or E) then the date is written to this item. If the database item that immediately follows the date item is either an N-type or Ktype data item and the data item name has "TIME” within it, then any time component of the date/time value is written to the time field. If there is a time component to the element value, but no N-type or K-type item to accept the time, then the time portion is ignored.

For an N-type time item only the hours and minutes are written; the seconds are ignored. For a K-type item, the hours, minutes and seconds are written to the unit portion of the K-type item — currently any decimal seconds are ignored.

On Output

At present we do not offer the ability to output a combined date/time field; just dates by
themselves.

Custom Fields